Thursday, April 10, 2008

USA Today tells us that 150,000 scrambled after more flights canceled. After more flights canceled what? You can scramble after more flight cancellations, or after more flights are canceled, but you can't scramble after more flights canceled, just as politicians can't say a bill bad. That's an improper headline shortcut.

Count me in the "just don't get it" crowd, I'm afraid. Could you explain in some logical way why "Candidate says budget deficit intolerable" is not okay and "Budget deficit intolerable, candidate says" is okay? I'm assuming it's not just some arbitrary rule. I understand the objection that we can call something intolerable but not "say it intolerable," but logically, isn't that still exactly what the "okay" version does?

To those who don't see the error in the sample headlines, it's possible your moment of confusion is so brief as to be undetectable. For others, the pause and re-read take longer and are more disruptive. These examples probably aren't the worst offenders. When you are on the lookout for mistakes -- e.g., when you're reading a blog post that points them out - it's harder to understand how a random reader scanning headlines could misunderstand.

To me, what's funny (in both senses) about the "150,000 scramble" headline is that it implies that all these people are trying to get more flights canceled. "To scramble after something" means to run, stumbling and jostling with others, after some object, e.g., "The players scrambled after the ball." Perhaps if the line break in the headline were different, I wouldn't read it this way, but it should probably have been rewritten entirely.

The best solution to the "scramble after" problem, it now occurs to me, would be to reverse the order of the syntagms and, as renita suggests, turn the atrophied subordinate clause into a prepositional phrase:After more canceled flights,150,000 scramble

That headline is a perfect example of the sort of work that ACES reader panelists rip us for each year. As I remember vividly from last year, they make clear that they don't appreciate — or follow — our shortcuts. Just because we think they should know what we're saying doesn't mean we have any idea if they actually do. And such disconnects between headline writers and headline readers are dangerous indeed.

The point about headlines is that there is a trade-off between brevity and intelligibility.

You are quite within your rights as chief copy editor for the Washington Post to make a rule that helping verbs are needed in subordinate clauses. However that rule is unlikely to be kept if it is commonly flouted elsewhere, or does not tie in with the average reader or writer's use of language.

In this case no paper has used the headline 'two shot police say' and it has only been used for one story in the form 'police say two shot'. The same is true for 'police say two killed'

We are talking about newspaper conventions, and I know newspaper conventions better than you do. The New York Times stylebook joins the Post stylebook in prescribing just when you can and can't omit a helping verb.